Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (1930-2023) was a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and a writer, poet, and professor emerita of Native American studies at Eastern Washington University. She was the author of many books, including Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy and Anti-Indianism in Modern America, and the coauthor of The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty.

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NEW INDIANS, OLD WARS

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Preface...............................................................................................................xiIntroduction..........................................................................................................11. To Keep the Plot Moving............................................................................................72. An Aside: How Do We Know about Literary Indians?...................................................................433. Warriors, Still?...................................................................................................654. The Pitfalls of Telling Tribal Histories: Lewis and Clark, Colonial Diaries, and Fool Soldiers.....................875. Defensive, Regulatory, and Transformative Functions of Indian Studies..............................................1146. The Struggle for Cultural Heritage.................................................................................1547. The Ghosts of American History in Art and Literature...............................................................178Conclusion............................................................................................................197Notes.................................................................................................................211

Chapter One

A LEARNED PROFESSION

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the atmosphere in the academy toward indigenous studies seems to be varied, often seemingly lackluster, coated with a veneer of Cartesian blandishment of logic and rationalism but very little passion, a far different scene from that of the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. That is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you expect as you remember, observe, and record the stories, secrets, and scandals of the past. It is a good thing because it is time for the passionate rhetoric to be cooled and the general agreement of our past struggles for our place in the sun to be, by common consent, intellectually and verbally conveyed into positive ideas and consequences in all ways. This is one of the significant pathways to American Indian Studies as an academic discipline. It is a bad thing because the discipline risks losing its evocative dialogue so important to an almost legendary time known in the vernacular as "the sixties" when American Indians told a callous and greedy America that we are not vanished and our lands our not for sale or trade.

It is almost impossible in this early decade of the 2000s to get anyone in the mainstream to talk about the things that aging American Indian scholars like the writer of this text want to talk about as participants in those fabulous years of origin. The average American does not want to talk about how to improve tribal governments or the schools, as Indians of the past century have wanted. The average American does not want to talk anymore about ongoing and radical racism in America, only the end of racism, according to Dinesh D'Souza, and nothing about the work of a contemporary Indian intellectual like Dr. David Wilkins, whose study of the U.S. Supreme Court and American Indians is perhaps the most important book of the past decade, which indicates that Indians are at great risk in U.S. law. When those subjects are brought up, silence falls upon the room and the speaker is looked at as though he or she has some contagious disease or has just brought up the subject of herpes or some other unmentionable horror.

In 2004, a public event illustrated the point that what America wants to talk to Indians about, if they want to talk at all, is distant and irrelevant; thus, this event caught the eye of mainstream folks and the media. I bring it up here to illustrate that the real issues of finding solutions to a better life for contemporary Indians in the region known for its racist atmosphere were once again put on the back burner so that that the public could look away from the actual troubling matters of the people and, instead, address the latest sensation. In the early winter, people flocked to the federal courthouse to witness a contrived/staged murder trial in Rapid City, South Dakota, of a hapless Oglala, Arlo Looking Cloud, who had spent most of the past few decades on the streets of Denver, Colorado, and was now caught in a dragnet for old American Indian Movement (AIM) personages and troublemakers. The trial was about who killed Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, a Micmac Indian from Canada who joined AIM in those fabulous years of the 1970s; Looking Cloud, some thirty years later, was charged with her murder, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. The issue of that trial was whether Pictou-Aquash was murdered by Looking Cloud at the behest of some unnamed and unnamable participants in the discredited American Indian Movement because it was thought she was an FBI informant.

The trial drew in all of the old suspects and bystanders. Participants and news organizations from around the region were in attendance, notebooks and cameras in hand. Among the witnesses was Darlene Nichols (formerly known as Kamook), the ex-wife of AIM generalissimo Dennis Banks, who testified for a substantial time recounting the fear in her friend Pictou-Aquash who, it was said, was terrified of AIM. The truth is, Pictou-Aquash was probably scared of the FBI, too, as we all were during that period. At the time I was a professor in Indian Studies at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington, and was casually visited and rigorously interrogated by the FBI a couple of times because of my acquaintance with the issues and some of the people involved in the movement. It was a frightening time and we were all afraid, not of movement leaders, but of the federal government and what it could do to us in terms of U.S. law and justice. We trusted no one. The belated trial itself was an astonishing event, not because the U.S. prosecutors had prevailed throughout the thirty years of investigation and court procedures, but rather because no one expected that luminaries of the movement would be found testifying against themselves and for the prosecution years later.

In the intervening years, as we all know, life has a tendency to just go on. Dennis Banks's ex-wife, a major witness for the prosecution in the Looking Cloud murder case, has become for a brief time a casting director for a movie studio in Hollywood, which means that we can probably expect some third-rate movies at our theaters soon, as well as some poorly written books about the subject of justice in Indian Country. Indeed, there is a book published by the University of Oklahoma Press about Dennis Banks entitled Ojibwa Warrior, written by Dennis Banks and Richard Erdoes. Does this sound familiar? It should. Erdoes, the European photographer who made a star of a half-breed teenager named Mary Moore (aka Mary Crow Dog), who bore a child during the 1974 seventy-one-day siege or takeover at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. In the heat of the battle, she was portrayed as a brave-hearted woman bearing a child in the midst of a warrior cult during a mythic time. At that same moment, without any press notices of any kind, matrons on the Lakota/Dakota homelands were objecting to her celebrity, saying, "No. No. Mary Moore is NOT a role model for our young daughters.... She is like the young girls caught up...